Silverlight 3 Beta developer runtimes: Windows or Mac. If you installed the tools above, you will get the developer runtime and there is no need to install it again. These downloads are being made available for test machines for the Windows and Mac platforms for your applications.

Using computers in the cloud can make lots of sense. Rather than buying and maintaining your own machines, why not exploit the acres of Internet-accessible servers on offer today? Get an early look into the Azure Services Platform in this White Paper by David Chappell.

This whitepaper shows developers how to use a claims-based identity model and the Microsoft® .NET Access Control Service – part of the Microsoft® .NET Services family – to implement single sign-on, federated identity, and role based access control in Web applications and services.

This whitepaper shows developers how to use the .NET Service Bus – part of the Microsoft® .NET Services family – to provide a secure, standards-based messaging fabric to connect applications across the Internet.

This whitepaper provides details about the Microsoft® .NET Workflow Service, its relation to Windows Workflow Foundation, and what developers need to know to begin building workflows for the cloud. It not only explains the current tools and capabilities but also outlines the vision for future releases.

Windows Azure Table provides scalable, available, and durable structured storage in the form of tables. The tables contain entities, and the entities contain properties. The tables are scalable to billions of entities and terabytes of data, and may be partitioned across thousands of servers. The tables support ACID transactions over single entities and rich queries over the entire table. Simple and familiar .NET and REST programming interfaces are provided via ADO.NET Data Services. This paper describes these concepts and the advanced features of Windows Azure Table.

Windows Azure Storage provides durable, scalable, available, secure, and performance-efficient storage services for the cloud, and it does this through familiar and easy-to-use programming interfaces. Windows Azure Blob provides a simple interface for storing named files along with metadata for a file. This paper describes the Windows Azure Blob programming interface and the advanced blob concepts.

Windows Azure Storage provides durable, scalable, available, secure, and performance-efficient storage services for the cloud, and it does this through familiar and easy-to-use programming interfaces. Windows Azure Queue provides reliable storage and delivery of messages for an application. This paper describes the Windows Azure Queue programming interface and the advanced queue concepts.

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) introduces an exciting new way for applications to build strongly typed queries that are deeply integrated into the programming language. The ADO.NET Entity Framework allows applications and services to work in terms of an application-oriented Entity Data Model, decoupling the application's data model from the storage considerations of the relational schema. Join this webcast to see how these two technologies work together to change the way applications work with data.

Join this series as we look at Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as a productive data platform. Throughout this series, we use Contoso (Container Overseas Shipping Operation) LTD as our scenario customer while we explore the features that make SQL Server 2008 this platform.

MSDN geekSpeak is a new kind of webcast series, hosted by Glen Gordon and Susan Wisowaty from the MSDN Events team, that provides a "talk-radio" format where industry experts share their knowledge of and experience with a particular developer technology. In this installment of geekSpeak, Julia Lerman, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), discusses the next version of ADO.NET, which presents a host of new ways to interact with data in your Microsoft .NET applications. Learn how the ADO.NET Entity Framework provides for abstracted access to your data, client views and schemas, and mapping of data to objects. See how you can build queries on the client against your own views and schemas using Entity SQL and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ).

The Entity Framework is a new data technology from Microsoft that may particularly interest database administrators (DBAs). Join this webcast to see how this technology can radically change the development of applications from a DBA perspective, and also change access patterns on servers. We discuss these changes and their impact on DBAs and data developers.

In other sessions, we explored how Microsoft .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is used for Structured Query Language (SQL) databases and working with XML. In this webcast, we connect to the data access layer, the business objects that provide the functionality of working with enterprise data. Join us to learn how you can make your LINQ applications really sing when working with entities.

To me I feel very excited about EF as it has got more power and capability than L2S. L2S was important for us to understand the new era of Object Relational Model (ORM) with native programming language querying (LINQ) capabilities. But going forward EF is the technology you should be focusing on.

There has been another concern comes from dev community is that is LINQ to SQL going to retire? Answer to that is no. Microsoft will continue to support L2S and enhance based on customer feedback. Tim Mallalieu clearly have mentioned in his Post that Microsoft will heavily invest into EF and the most wanted features like POCO will be with .NET 4.0.

EF is the recommended data access solution while accessing data using LINQ. LINQ to SQL will also be there.

So when the question arises what to choose? Go ahead and plan for Entity Framework. I would like to share some of my thoughts around it,

At the end of the story I still feel good about LINQ to SQL when it comes to smaller applications with less complexity. Entity Framework is capable of handling large enterprise applications and will have more power in v2 (in .NET 4.0). So if you are targeting your application for multiple databases the L2S is not the right choice for you.

My vote is for ADO.NET Entity Framework. You will enjoy with the conceptual model and Astoria.

Offline-Enabled Data Services and Desktop ApplicationsLearn how to create offline-capable applications that have a local replica of their data, how to synchronize that replica with an online data service when a network connection becomes available, and how replicas can be used with the ADO.NET Entity Framework.